Law Schools

'Not Acceptable': Law School Bombs Bar Exam, But Dean Promises To 'Fix It'

Less than half of this school's graduates passed the exam this summer.

By  
on

The results of the July 2018 administration of the New York bar exam were released this week. Sixty-three percent of all test-takers passed the exam, and the overall pass rate for first-time takers was 74 percent. As we noted, “These results are certainly not as good as they were last year, and seem to be dangerously close to July 2015’s results, which were the worst the state had seen in at least 35 years.”

When the results were released, we also learned that 81 percent of first-time takers from ABA-accredited law schools in New York passed the exam. While we don’t yet know how all New York law schools fared on the July 2018 exam (we imagine those statistics will be released sometime in late November), we know about the pass rate for first-time takers for one law school — and it isn’t very good at all.

Which law school’s first-time pass rate was so bad that it warranted a dean’s letter to alumni to assure them that immediate steps would be taken to correct the problem?

That would be the Touro College Law Center, whose recent graduates posted a 48.6 percent pass rate on the New York bar exam. Last summer, 64.8 percent of first-time takers from Touro Law passed the exam, which means we’re looking at a double-digit decline of 16.2 percentage points. This is extremely concerning — or, as Dean Harry Ballan wrote in his letter to alumni, “[t]his is not acceptable.”

Here’s an excerpt from Dean Ballan’s letter, which was sent to alumni yesterday:

The faculty and I have begun to implement extensive reforms involving changes in the classroom, curriculum and culture of the school. We expect these changes to be reflected favorably in future results.

Some of the changes are still being implemented. We intend to accelerate their implementation effective immediately.

We will be re-examining in detail everything we do, in and outside of the classroom, to investigate the causes of these results and to assure that the continued implementation of reforms, from evidence-based teaching to curricular reform, is successful.

Hmm, with respect to Dean Ballan, there’s no mention here about improving the school’s admissions standards. It’s well known that a student’s LSAT score is a fairly good predictor as to whether that student will pass the bar exam. The 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile LSAT scores of Touro Law’s entering class in 2015 ranged from 145 to 149, and according to Law School Transparency, those scores placed students at a high to very high risk of failing the bar exam — and more than half of them did fail.

Sponsored

“We own it; we’ll fix it,” Dean Ballan pledges in his letter. For the sake of future graduates, perhaps something more than “changes in the classroom, curriculum, and culture of the school” needs to be implemented immediately here.

(Flip to the next page to see Dean Ballan’s letter in full.)

Earlier: The New York Bar Exam Results Are Out, And They’re Not So Great (July 2018)

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Sponsored

1 2Next »

Topics

, , ,